There is a cross atop a hill in Waterbury, Connecticut. The cross is fifty feet tall and made of steel. Below it, ten-foot-tall neon letters spell out HOLY LAND U.S.A, a ‘testament’ to the religious amusement park, now closed, that occupies the site. The sign and the cross are still illuminated at night, the electric bill paid by the two nuns who live next to the property. Holy Land was an amusement park, built in the mid-1950s by a local lawyer named John Greco; the park was aimed at educating visitors in Christian doctrine by showing them scenes from the life of Christ.

Holy Land did not have rides or roller coasters — just an earnest desire to teach. This lofty goal was accomplished with simple materials — plaster, concrete, plywood, and tin siding. Since its closure in 1984, the park has slowly crumbled to become a ruin of religious proportions.

The entrance to Holy Land. The wood-and-plaster architecture is found throughout the park, as is the faux-ancient-Palestinian style.

Holy Land is easy to find and easier to access. Drive towards the cross, prominent on one of Waterbury’s tallest hills, or follow any of several road signs that local authorities still — after 25 years — managed not to remove. Then walk around the locked gate, hoping that the nuns don’t see you. (The nuns, part of the Religious Teachers Filippini, do not seem especially vigilant.)

Jerusalem in miniature. Each building is between eight and twelve inches tall.

Just inside the entrance is a set of archways, labeled “Holy Land — Jerusalem.” These lead to the heart of the park, a rocky hill covered in miniature buildings. It feels like the type of thing your wacky uncle might build in his backyard. The buildings, most made of plaster and wood, are meant to represent Jerusalem as it existed during the life of Jesus Christ. The original installation used a crude version of forced perspective, placing larger buildings closer to the path.

This building is about three feet tall.

The park seems to maintain a fine balance between between sincerity and kitsch: A building next to the path, about the size of a large doghouse, has caved in on itself. Across its front, the letters spell out “HEROD’S PALACE,” but the style of the letters suggests something your father might have picked up at the corner hardware store to nail the family name above the front door; really, that describes most of the park.

The tiny buildings are pieced together from plywood. Tin siding has been bent into columns, then crudely covered with plaster. House paints, in mid-20th-century colors, have transformed a motley collection of tiny shacks into a vision of the Middle East. Of the Holy Land.

The stainless-steel cross is different. In a clearing at the top of the hill, beyond the crumbling Jerusalem, it feels clean and no-nonsense, an architecture reminiscent of US military bases and mid-century hospitals. The welds are precise, the angles sharp. It is also new, the second such cross to crown the site. Its predecessor, replaced last year, was six feet taller and made of neon, but both were meant to last. They towered above Waterbury and were visible from the highways–I-84, CT-8–that pass beneath the park. From the top of the hill, Waterbury and the Brass Mill Mall stretch out beneath you.

The Hollywood-style letters were also renovated, by Boy Scouts in 1997. Together, the cross and letters burn bright in Waterbury’s night sky. That’s the paradox of Holy Land. It is abandoned, derelict, and falling in on itself, but still able to summon compassion and care from those around it. Every attempt to demolish the park has brought protests. The cross and letters remain lit at night because they are a local icon, a vital part of Waterbury.

We spent about 40 minutes in the park and left just after sunset. It’s a small park. It is also decaying quickly. The miniature sphinx visible in various photos online has lost its face. A life-size tin statue of Jesus holding a lamb has been lopped off at the shin, the upper part of His body now gone. The concrete rock garden built by Boy Scouts barely a decade ago–HONOR GOD, it used to read–has been vandalized, so that it now reads HONOR COD.

Inside the park, there are few hazards beyond underbrush and pricker bushes. The paths, like the rest of the park, are overgrown, and trash–mostly beer cans–abounds. The park’s existence is no secret, and it seems especially popular with local teenagers.

Holy Land is gone, but not forgotten. People still care about the park–the nuns with the electric bill, the Boy Scouts who replaced the sign, the photographers and explorers who still frequent its grounds. I’d like to be able to pin an adjective on my experience, to summon a word that encapsulates the park. But I can’t, really. The park wasn’t creepy, wasn’t thrilling. It had none of the drama or tragedy of Six Flags New Orleans. Despite the decayed statuary, there was nothing about it that summoned “Ozymandias.” Mostly it felt innocent. It is one man’s loving paean to a religion. It is a material hymn sung to Jesus Christ.

Further Research:

• Roadside America has an entry on Holy Land, including photos and instructions for getting there.
• Two relatively recent New York Times articles, here and here, detail the ongoing plans to save or restore Holy Land.
• Roadtrip Memories has excellent collection of vintage photos of Holy Land, including construction shots.
• More vintage photos and postcards are in this Flickr set.

Downtown Beirut is full of silent and boarded buildings, which stand between the featureless identical cement apartment blocks that make up the periphery. Most are pockmarked with bullet holes and — in places — red, Mediterranean-style ceramic tiles have fallen away, revealing the woodwork beneath. Still, these damaged, pre-civil war houses, mansions and apartment buildings manage to recall more than a little of the elegance that earned Beirut the title, “Paris of the Middle-East.” It’s a blatantly colonial term, given to the city by the French during their “administration” of the country from the end of the first world war until the end of the second. But the dirtied white facades of these buildings manage to catch the low-slanting light of sunset with a defiant brilliance their sterile replacements just can’t muster. They were designed to catch Mediterranean sunsets.

On Rue Spears, a couple of blocks past the Saneyeh park towards downtown, a prime example of Lebanese pre-war architecture sits mouldering behind a forbidding stone wall. I saw it on my first day of a 2008 winter break trip to Beirut to visit my father, a professor at the Lebanese American University. There is a certain prestige implicit with being the first explorer to hit an important building, and as far as I could tell there were no active explorers in all of Beirut. As such, I was out on the street every day at sunrise, hoping to make the best of my two weeks there.

This building is a standing, contradictory dichotomy — dark and gorgeous at the same time. The 10-foot high wall and chained, rusting gates create an atmosphere of something off-limits yet irresistible; its very demeanor from the outside implicitly suggests a world of secrets to discover.

On my first trip out I circled the block alone to find myself receiving suspicious stares from the urban-camouflaged Lebanese police. These eagle-eyed sentries stand near red and white striped guard houses glowering with their M-16s. Societally, cameras are looked upon with suspicion in Beirut. Tourists fare better than most, but any photographer walking around taking snapshots can expect to be questioned by a security or policeman.

This was especially so around the LAU campus, where I studied in 2003. The LAU campus sits adjacent to Saad Hariri’s palace, a gigantic structure built in the old pre-war Mediterranean style. Every time I walked in or out of the front gate with a giant Nikon hanging from my neck a security guard would run up to me repeating “No photo, no photo,” like a magic, protective mantra. I wonder if it ever occurred to them that a spy would probably use a smaller, less obtrusive camera than a D200. I mean, a DSLR doesn’t exactly fit into a belt buckle or a pack of cigarettes. I wonder how they would react if they knew the entire layout of the grounds is readily available on Google Earth. Still, they have good cause to be nervous.

In 2005 Saad’s father, former prime minister and billionaire Rafic Hariri was killed, along with 21 other people, by a massive car bomb in front of the St. George Hotel in Beirut. A Lebanese man I met told me that the hotel’s owner was one of Hariri’s opponents, and Saad has since blocked any attempts to rebuild the place. It sits vacant on the sea, another monument to violence. Since then, Saad has assumed leadership of the Sunni and Maronite anti-Syrian coalition — Hezbollah’s chief competition. These simmering tensions, amplified by the subsequent withdrawal of Syrian troops from the country and the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, exploded in a mini-civil war in 2007, during which Hezbollah fighters occupied and burned FutureTV, owned by Saad, the mouthpiece of the anti-Hezbollah Future Movement.

I recall speaking to my father on the phone then, me in rural Illinois working my first newspaper job, he in his campus apartment — the roar of gunfire from the street below competed with his voice for my attention. I recall not only the expected, intense worry for his safety, but how disconcerted I was by his own apparent lack of it. He was more upset by the fact that the cable was out than by the rocket propelled grenades aimed at Hariri’s Palace, a couple of hundred feet away.

My father’s relative indifference could have stemmed from a regional adjustment to conflict. The waves of violence in Beirut hit like the seasonal flooding of an undammed river. The waters pull back, the silt settles and the shop keepers on Hamra sweep the dust off their doorways, no longer surprised by much of anything.

The decaying mansion I set out to explore sits across the street from the new FutureTV office, and the guards, manning a checkpoint a block way, stare in that way that always strikes the few American tourists who come to Beirut. It’s simply not considered rude to lock eyes with strangers for extended periods of time. And when the person staring at you is holding a loaded machine gun it sets your nerves on edge. So, after two trips around the block trying to find a way in, I decided to head home rather than have to again explain to a policeman why I had a camera; what I was taking pictures of; why I wanted to take pictures, etc. At first, the only glimpse I got was through a hole in the back gate. I saw an overgrown courtyard, full of trees and bushes that obscured the quiet and vacant mansion.

It wasn’t until a few days later that I went back, this time with Michel, a friend who works in computers downtown. It was his first time exploring; I don’t speak Arabic and figured a translator would be handy if I encountered anyone in the building.

We walked around to the front courtyard and bought local energy drinks from the corner shop that occupies the lower part of what was once the mansion’s guard house. Down the street is a small car repair shop, and we ducked behind it, seeking a secluded place to scale the wall. Walking down the alley between the courtyard wall and what appeared to be another abandoned building to the right, I was reminded of why exploring abandoned buildings in Beirut is a tricky business – you have to be considerate of the people who live in them.

The truth is, despite being home to a great many abandoned buildings, Beirut has very few vacant ones. Look beyond the pristine beauty of the rebuilt downtown area or the ritzy, exclusive dance clubs around Monot street — packed with rich kids going to school at LAU or AUB — and you’ll find a grossly unequal distribution of wealth in Lebanon.

About a kilometer from the giant and gorgeous blue-domed mosque built by Rafic, Syrian day laborers loiter around a filthy, vacant lot hoping for a day’s work. Many of these people choose to live rent-free in the many abandoned buildings of the city, often stealing power and even photo service from nearby lines. Look up in some places around the city and the huge number of pirated electric and phone lines forms a kind of multi-colored spiderweb, intricate and impressive.

This abandoned building, adjacent to the mansion we sought to explore, had a similar life support system jacked in from the city’s power grid. Laundry hung out on balconies and potted plants added a bit of color. Baskets hung on ropes that reached from top floor balconies to the alley below. It’s a general rule — if a building can provide shelter for someone, chances are it does.

We scaled the wall, one at a time; Michel provided me with a boost and I pulled him up in turn. The courtyard of the mansion must have been gorgeous. Giant, old trees of that strange type in Lebanon that throws down roots from the limbs into the ground, creating a miniature forest, dotted the landscape. Garbage was everywhere — old luggage, tires, children’s toys and literally thousands of empty plastic bottles. A dead white rabbit lay in a tree, balanced on a piece of carpet. I have no idea who put it there or why; it might have been one of the army of stray cats that live short, desperate lives in orbit around the city’s dumpsters. I quickly took its picture.

I wasn’t surprised when we saw a power line leading into the side of the building, as well as a garden hose. The doors on this side entrance were nailed shut from the inside, and the hose and power lines were threaded through holes drilled in the wood. Someone was living there, that was certain. I expected Michel to want to turn back, but he’d received an adrenaline jolt from hopping the wall and wanted to find a window to climb through. Fair enough, I said, conscious that I just agreed to go inside of someone’s home. Walking around to the front, I looked back at the side entrance and was really struck by how wealthy the former tenants must have been. Even though it was only the side door, it was flanked by tall, elegantly carved columns. It was an entrance worthy of any mansion, yet before the war it was probably used by house workers to bring in food and take out garbage.

We moved around to the front. Identical sets of white marble steps flanked an empty fountain and buttressed the arched and ornate French doors. It was then, as I turned facing the cobbled entrance road, that I imagined black European luxury cars stopping to disgorge impossibly well-coiffured party guests. We jimmied the door using a long piece of cut marble fallen off the steps to push aside the board that someone had jammed into the door. Michel had a big grin on his face, finding out what more experienced explorers already know and what keeps us coming back: the need to see the forbidden and off-limits is ingrained in our DNA as humans.

The barricade fell with a clatter and we entered the grand hall, silent and accepting. There were no footprints in the deep dust that covered the floor; we walked in a silent, reverent fashion that the building seemed to demand of us. Our footsteps were light and silent; our voices half-whispers.

What immediately caught my eye was the giant pile of papers at the end of the hall. Upon closer inspection many of the papers turned out to be black and white photographs — hundreds of them, all of the same elderly man in a tall, flat-topped Fez-style hat, at what appeared to be political events. In some of the photos the walls were covered in campaign posters bearing his image. Always: Around him were supporters, cheering and clapping. The other documents, Michel told me, were voter registration lists – hundreds of names, addresses and phone numbers. There were also various memos and letters. He didn’t know who the man in the photo was.

Michel went upstairs and I took out my tripod to shoot the photos in the low light. My camera’s timer, a soft beep, beep, beep seemed to echo in the dead, cold hall. It was after the third or fourth shot that I heard the footsteps behind me, crunching the broken glass of a long-shattered window. I turned, expecting to see Michel. Instead I encountered the scowl of a very large and very humorless Syrian man in heavy boots. His shoulders were gigantic, the product of years of manual labor. His eyes had no smile lines.

“I…I’m just taking pictures,” I offered, impotently, not expecting him to understand.

“It’s not open,” He replied, in what my memory holds to have been a deep growl.

“I…noticed.” And we just kind of stared at each other.

I was saved by Michel, who came down to tell me of a desk he found upstairs. A short exchange ensued which Michel later translated to me as:

Syrian: “You’re not allowed to come in here.”

Michel: “Well, we already are.”

Michel’s kind of gutsy like that. Especially considering the man could have easily kicked our teeth in. As it was, he agreed to give us 20 minutes after realizing we weren’t cops. We moved upstairs quickly, deciding to forsake the south wing of the house where we assumed the squatters lived. The clatter of our break-in must have echoed throughout the house.

Upstairs we found more clues as to the political nature of the home. A bookshelf, full of rotting books, sat in a room no longer protected by a roof. They were all political texts, some in French, some in Arabic. A book by Francois Mitterrand; another entitled, “for Lebanon” — books ruined by years of rainy Beirut winters.

In the next room was large wooden desk, of the sort befitting a president or CEO, Michel remarked. It sat next to pointed, arched windows and a balcony with a view of the courtyard and street below. I looked out and saw two bored Lebanese policeman smoking cigarettes and watching the passing cars. One of my favorite parts of exploring is looking out of windows on upper floors and watching cars, cyclists and joggers who pass and don’t look up where I am — a place I can’t help but notice.

There were Bedrooms, too. They were covered in an inch of red sand and colorful, flowered wallpaper. A few televisions, newspapers, some empty cigarette packets. The kitchen had been used by squatters at one point — an unopened can of peaches sported a 1988 expiration date. And they had left behind half-full barrels of cooking oil and a large bag of rice. Photos of female Lebanese pop stars torn from magazines decorated some of the walls.

There were bullet holes in the wall opposite the windows. Someone who had spent his or her mornings making spare breakfasts likely sought an antidote against those bullet holes; they saw in the perfect teeth of a pop star, the rim light and soft-focus photography, something better than the monotonous clattering of gunfire that drifted in like a cold front from the Green Line.

We only explored part of the mansion, content that something was better than nothing. With our presence known and no doubt communicated to whoever else was living there, we decided that overstaying our already cold welcome would be foolhardy, especially if they found out how we’d entered.

“He asked us how we managed to get in,” Michel laughed. “I told him we climbed in through an open window”

“What if he looks at the door and finds we kicked it in?”

“I dont’ think he’d be happy.”

On our way out we grabbed as many of the photos as we could. It seemed wrong to let them slowly decay, falling prey to piss and rainwater. As we re-crossed the courtyard I looked back and saw three windows on the third floor of the south wing filled with men staring at us, these strange intruders. I waved. They did not wave back.

A few days later I dropped in on Bassam Lahoud, photography professor at the Lebanese American University. A man for all seasons, Bassam is an architect, writer and dance instructor. He’s from Amchit, a small, charming mountain village near Byblos, the longest continually inhabited city on the planet. Bassam taught me how to use a camera, a Canon 35mm A1 from the 1970s. He runs a foundation with the modest aim of collecting every single photo ever taken of Lebanon. Any photo. Of anything. I handed him the warped stack of black and white photos from the mansion.

“Takkieddin el-Solh” he said. “He was a prime minister.”

We had broken into the former prime minister’s home. Evidently he had abandoned it when Beirut began to tear itself to shreds in 1975. His time in office had ended a year before. In 1980 he was asked by the president to form a government but was unable to find consensus in a country at war with itself. He died in 1988 in Paris.

“Can I keep one of these? For my foundation?” Bassam asked.

Of course. Of course. I gave him all of the photos, and copied 8 gigs of .jpg files onto his desktop. I wanted to feel like I was contributing something.

He looked at my photos of the mansion, the ones you’re looking at now. “Perhaps we could do an exhibition some time, at my house in Amchit, where we took the field trip.” He had taken his entire class to his home for a day to practice architectural photography. His house is gorgeous, a mansion too, built before the civil war yet free of scars. Yes, of course you can do an exhibition, Bassam. When I put them up on Flickr I set the license to Creative Commons.

I said my goodbyes to Bassam and went downstairs. Outside, there was a campus demonstration against the Israeli air assault in Gaza. Students chanted and burned Israeli flags. In a brief moment of unity, yellow Hezbollah flags waved next to the red and white Lebanese. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and for the moment they had found in war a reason to come together. It’s not sustainable, I thought. I raised my camera and took their picture. Smoke billowed from burning flags, and painted faces cheered, chanted.

Further Reference

• Full Set of Photos from the Mansion
• New York Timse Obituary for Takieddin Solh
  

On Memorial Day of 2007, and then again in December, I visited two separate Titan I missile sites. The first was quite the introduction. The second was mind-blowing. There are no words to describe being in what is perhaps the world’s largest underground missile complex. In fact, I’ve tried more than once, and in my mind have not achieved an adequate description. Last month, I clicked on a random link and encountered the narrative of another man who had done the same. His words, and his story came much closer to describing the feeling in detail. Even better, this man knew all of the intricacies of the base. He was a true savant of Titan I – and probably the foremost non-military expert of these historic bases. I contacted him and asked if he would be willing to talk about his experience and he readily agreed. Though he prefers to be known here only by his first name, he was more than willing to tell me his story.

Discovering a “Titan” in an Early Tour

It was 1993 and Pete had just moved into Colorado. He managed to come in contact with someone who gave him a tour of one of the nearby sites. “This man had been there once before and had taken some pictures,” Pete said, “but he didn’t really have much in the way of technical information, he simply knew they were there.” Pete’s first impression was much the same as mine: “I was amazed at the scale,” he said.

Years passed, and around 1998 Pete had casually mentioned his visit to a friend, who had become so interested in the Titan site that he developed a business plan around its purchase. That’s how Pete originally got full, unfettered access. It was the beginning of a long-term obsession and the start of detailed foray into the operations and the minutiae of the entire base.

A Dash-1 Opens Doors

In the following months, Pete and two others descended deep into the snakelike passageways of the base discovering bits of the past along the way. With cameras and bright sources of continuous illumination in tow, Pete was able to capture – unlike anyone I’ve known before – the entire Titan complex. Every nook, every tunnel seems to be covered in detail. His site (http://www.chromehooves.net) is filled with what were once top secret blueprints of each staircase and ladder, the silos, terminals, emergency escapes and air shafts. In fact, all of this would perhaps not have been possible had Pete not encountered a serendipitous find: Buried deep beneath stacks of junk, in a small room next to the power dome, Pete had found a complete Dash-1.

What is a Dash-1? It is essentially the technical manual to a Titan 1 complex (You can download a Dash-1 here 75MB – PDF) . “Typically a lot of documents were destroyed,” Pete told me, “A lot of the [documents] I saw down there I haven’t seen anywhere.” Within the 120 lbs of papers he would come to know the inner workings of Titan I’s operation – even the most mundane of activities, including detailed instructions on how to clean the launch console. Pete was able to glean all he needed to know from the Dash-1 and the nearby  materials. It was his source book for his next project. “I had a big set of blueprints for the Titan base and I thought I could translate these things into a game map,” Pete told me matter-of-factly.

The Original Blueprint of the Titan Power Dome

Pete’s Three-dimensional Map of the Power Dome and nearby structures of the Titan base.

On his own, on evenings and weekends, in the period of about six months and comprising well over 100 hours worth of work, he constructed a detailed three-dimensional game environment that depicts what it feels like to be inside of an entire Titan base. As someone who has been inside of a base thrice, I could honestly say that it was an eerie and realistic journey back into those spaces. It sparked memories of visits to the silo that I didn’t know existed. I had felt the same feeling that came upon me as I looked down into the empty void of the silo – and it all happened from my laptop. I knew I had to talk to the man who created this game map.

Titan I Adventures in Narrative

As an interviewee, Pete is quite modest, but modest men are usually those who have the most to be proud of. I know for a fact that nobody but Pete (other than perhaps a few military contractors and past base personnel) could tell me the thickness of concrete inside of the power dome (“less than two feet thick of reinforced concrete at the apex”). The research alone – including the images, which I’ve seen nowhere else despite all of my own former efforts at researching the bases, are telling witness to his fastidiousness. Pete had an explanation for each intricate, working part. For example, he knew the weight of the missile (“in excess of 200,000 pounds”); he knew that the emergency exits were once full of sand (“A winch lowered the hatch safely as the sand poured in and the tunnel cleared”); and he even knew the dirtiest, grittiest details (literally) – the bathroom fixtures were built to be entirely shock proof, the toilets of which are probably the only toilets in the world sitting on shock absorbers.

The facility seems to resurrect itself through Pete’s descriptions. Everything becomes an anthropomorphic organ. The power dome is the “heart” of the site, and the control center (a much smaller dome, but no less important) its “brain.” One gets the sense of a massive, underground living organism, precision-engineered to deliver deadly weapons. Its proper operation is contingent on so many working parts that it almost becomes impossible to fathom how these things ran smoothly with little mishap and few fatalities.

Then there are the construction images… I’m sure Pete spent nearly as much time researching the bases as he did creating the 3-D fly-through of the base. I have never seen construction photos in such detail. Pete was able to dig up images from inside the silo, artistically captured in dramatic lighting and angle. The airman stands on the crib structure; to the side of him is a massive Titan I Missile. Off-gassing liquid oxygen seems to move within the image. The ominous weapon of mass destruction sits — peacefully, ironically — in its crib awaiting orders.

In fact, I myself have received messages from airmen who served within the Titan bases during the most chilling moments of the Cold War. Some recall the tense few months of standoff during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was perhaps the proudest moment in the history of Titan I and an unplanned yet convenient justification for their construction.

Peter approaches such facts neutrally and without agenda. He seems to see the sites as, primarily, a gigantic artifact ideal for study through observation. Never once do the political or moral implications enter into his narrative. It’s almost refreshing to see his approach materialize. It truly is a rare thing to have such a vast and time-consuming project not become something of a moral crusade.

Pete’s Final Days in the Titan Base

For Pete, though, Politics was too small (or too big?) of a subject to take up when his mind was set on one thing: The complete and unhindered exploration of the base. After all of the webpages one navigates in his site, the crux of it all is saved for last. Clicking through the blueprints you eventually find yourself at the silos themselves. Punctuated by photographs from its operation are the personal reflections of a man obsessed: “The missile is protected within the silo by 2 silo doors, each weighing around 115 tons each and opened and closed hydraulically by 2 pistons that control movement in both directions. Within this steel and concrete chrysalis, the missile rests atop its launcher platform, ensconced within a massive steel cribwork comprising the launcher system where it waits for the orders that will transform it from a mass of inert metals and propellants into a weapon of terrible power.”

In those sentences I finally saw it all. Those of you who have been inside of the silo know the bare nature of the huge cylinder of air. Today, the crib structure is largely absent from all but one or two of the sites today. Instead, what occupies the space is – well – space. And before reading Pete’s description I could finally imagine what it was really like.

Pete knew what he had to do next. His window of opportunity was closing. Pete writes on his site: “There was one place I had seen precious little of, and another I had not seen at all. With my mind completely gone, I set about planning on how to see the catwalk level of the silos.” With only a few months left of access, Pete set out alone towards Silo #3. With a rough sketch of his route planned, he decided to make the climb. Below him was 100 feet of standing water full of volatile organic compounds and god-knows-how-many-dead-rats; above was the catwalk. Between him and the catwalk was a hodge-podge of service pipes, bones of crib beams, and conduits.

Pete went up with no climbing equipment or buddy. His journey was pure madness, but a type of madness that he doesn’t regret. “I can’t say that I wouldn’t do that again.” he frankly told me. “After a while you kind of forget what you see and curiosity sets in again. I just had to see it while I had the opportunity.”

Looking Ahead

As Pete finished up his conversation with me, I knew I wanted to know what final thing: What did he think would happen to these sites. Where will they be in 100, or even 1000 years? I had my own answer, but I knew his take would be much more interesting. He approached my question with a moment of silent thought.

His wheels were turning. He was contemplating the engineering of the site, the thickness of concrete. The supercomputer inside his brain (like any human brain, multiples more powerful than the actual nerve center of the Titan I) was quickly figuring out his answer. Pete said he thinks these bases will remain beyond even 1000 years from now.

His answer was a surprise to me and it only led to a hypothetical soothsayer’s look into these vast, underground ruins. If Rome had its roads and China had its wall – would these voids become monuments to our civilization’s ingenuity long after we’re gone? Will America be known for its military might through these giant sites? Or will we create something even larger and more dramatic to put civilizations centuries ahead of us in awe?

I said goodbye to Pete and closed the screen of my laptop. It was an unusually warm day in San Francisco as I walked down Mission Street. Still, such bright surroundings — sunshine and fresh fruit on sidewalks — couldn’t take my mind off of one thing. Among the many things Pete had seen underground they were mostly dead things, whether they were the rats that had fallen into the 150-foot silo; the unfortunate rabbits that catapulted themselves into an emergency exit portal that went five stories down; or even the garter snake that had somehow navigated its way into the control center only to find itself famished until it had become a skeleton.

Despite the myriad of journeys he took, Pete had never seen a living creature until one of his last trips underground. There, in the bottom of the deck plating of Tunnel Junction #10 he saw a tiny creature fully functioning and alive. The image stayed indelibly imprinted in my mind as an emblematic metaphor.

Then again, I’m always trying to inject meaning into everything. Maybe it was exactly how Pete described it. Maybe it really was just a “lone salamander.”

Related Information

1. Pete’s Web Site, which is entirely devoted to the Titan 1.
2. InfoBunker, where Pete’s current project resides, in Iowa.
3. Album of images of a Titan base in California, here on Terrastories.
4. Full transcript of the interview with Pete.